Presented in competition at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard selection and released in theaters in April 2017, the editorial team looks back at the DVD release of Hirokazu Kore-eda's latest film, After the Storm !
Ryôta, a former writer turned private detective, accumulates failures. Divorced and wasting all his money gambling, he tries to regain the trust of his 11-year-old son, Shingo, whom he sees once a month.
The theme of filiation
After Nobody Knows and Still Walking, the Japanese director considered the worthy heir of Ozu returns with a soft and melancholic transgenerational family fresco. Filiation and transmission are at the heart of Kore-eda's reflection and we find these themes throughout the film with in particular the question of death and inheritance, the expectations of parents vis-à-vis their children, the desire of children to resemble or not their parents …
One apartment, 3 generations
The grandmother's HLM, aptly played by Kirin Kiki, seems to be both the epicenter of all family problems but also a place of refuge. It allows you to protect yourself from the typhoon that hits the city and to return to childhood, to something soothing. The childish and carefree character is also reinforced by the presence of the park and the playground which becomes a place of sharing and connivance between child and parent, a place of respite in this family storm.
Personal fulfillment
After the Tempest also highlights the difficulty of fulfilling oneself as an adult. The character of Ryôta, who is neither really a hero nor really an anti-hero, perfectly illustrates this in-between, this status of adult who does not assume completely, who is not going to the end of his dreams and who is not irremediably irrecoverable. It is with the gentleness and benevolence characteristic of Kore-eda that we understand that we must sometimes simply show indulgence towards ourselves.
After the Tempest is one of those films that we enjoy seeing and rewatching and that therefore deserves its place on the DVD shelf of the show.
